The Drapers Arms, Barnsbury, N1

Absoloutely rammed on a Saturday afternoon with what appeared to be a wedding reception going on upstairs, It also seemed pretty full on gastro, one for midweek.

Relaxed Barnsbury hostelry, with an opened-out and thoroughly refurbished 'J'-shaped interior with the bar centre-front and a dining area in one branch. Fairly basic furniture but attractive, understated light decor. Three decent real ales on handpump: Harvey's, Siren Under Current and Dark Star Antares red ale (£3.80).

They had three ales on in here - London Fields Broadway Blond, Harvey's Sussex Best, and London Beer Factory Summer Pale Ale, the latter at a fairly reasonable £1.90 a half. There were also loads of less usually seen keg offerings, such as Weird Beard Mariana Trench, Camden Helles, and Brooklyn Lager. I didn't see a menu (I guess you are given one if you want to eat), but did see food being delivered to another table. One of the girls there was having a pint of prawns. This seems to be coming back into vogue now in gastropubs, as I saw another pint of prawns in a pub last week, which was the first that I had seen for many years. Fair enough if you like prawns. The floor's bare-boarded with what must be the original boards as they are just about the most distressed and/or well worn boards I've ever seen. On the matter of distressed state, the old brown armchairs and sofa at the back on the right are also contenders for the most distressed furniture award. The rest of the furnishings are also very basic - scrubbed tables with hard wooden chairs, and a large table accompanied by hard backless wooden benches of the old school dining room type. It's all very shabbily plain and simple. The bar counter looks original, but the tapered frontage is painted emerald green in counterpoint to the suppressed pastel shades everywhere else. The main bar area at the front leads back to another to another room the the left of the servery (more normal tables and chairs), and which in turn leads out to a garden at the back. Perhaps this pub's most interesting features are the round cut glass panes in the doors at the front of the pub. This one's OK in a sort of minimalist gastropub kind of way. A couple of ales from local micro-breweries always goes down well with me, and my London Beer Factory ale was in good shape, and at a welcome sub-£4 a pint. This old pub has gone down the gastropub route, but I guess that's what pubs around here have to do to survive.